11-year-old figures out how to brew beer for astronauts in space

Michal Bodzianowski is 11 years old, which is about the age you have to be to say with a straight face, “Beer, while known to most people as a ‘party drink’ or whatever, actually the alcohol has some medical properties.” So earnest! So scholarly! So clearly coming from the mouth of a person who has never had a beer before! Is there anything more delightful than a seventh-grade nerd?

Well, yes: a drunk astronaut. Which is why NASA is bringing the Colorado tween’s science experiment, which looks at the feasibility of fermentation in microgravity, onto the International Space Station.

OK, that’s a slight embellishment … it’s less because the astronauts want to get obliterated, and more because Michal’s microgravity brewing project won the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education’s Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. And also because he’s right — beer can be a backup drink if there’s a problem with the water filtration system, and alcohol does have medicinal properties, like disinfection. Plus, it might just teach us more about the fermentation process.

But we prefer to imagine zero-G beer pong. (Please cover Michal’s eyes before he reads that sentence. He’s got big things ahead of him and we don’t want him learning about the existence of beer pong just yet.)